The once lionised African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston started to make herself unpopular in the wake of Pearl Harbour, when she claimed the Japanese were no better or worse imperialists than the US themselves. This was the first of a cavalcade of discombobulating opinions that would result in their voicer being ostracised by those – both black and white on both left and right - whose own were more received than personally conceived. All this and a lot more is explained in her autobiography, 'Dust Tracks On A Road', which I discovered just a handful of days ago. Her ductile style hits the spot time and time again: even her takes on tiny details stick in the crop, as when she describes her white mistress's ludicrous lapdog: '...with his short legs, when he thought that he was running, he was just jumping up and down in the same place'; as does her now famous comment on her mother's recommendation to her children that they try to 'jump at de sun': 'We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.' But when, in the same book, she came out with statements like: 'It [black race consciousness] is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men. I choose to forget it', such freethinking would soon consign her to the remorseless oblivion reserved for politically unfashionable authors: by the time she died in 1960, her books were already as hard to find as her unmarked grave would turn out to be when posthumous admirers went hunting for it in the mid-1970s. Perhaps the most idiotic question that an interviewer ever asked me about a book of mine was 'Do you think people'll be reading it in 50 years?'. Please, I don't give a shit. Just spare me the fate of Zora Neale Hurston and so many other writers who managed to jump way off the ground, only to be buried alive under the self-serving orthodoxies of their respective times.